Archive of Past News of the Farm:
A Sashay in Time September 5, 2011 |
A Sashay in Time
September 5, 2011
Greetings Friends of the Farm,
Maybe it’s over? (After all the temperatures have dropped 15 degrees! ...to 90....)
Is there life after an historic heat wave?
We won’t know until...we know. The Toes Knows, but she’s not saying...
Toesy adds her toe-prints to the sand at the farm....
Well,
not being Toesy, we will just put one foot in front of the other,
alternate them, and repeat, and surely we’ll all make it to the other
side, which in my opinion is November.In late August, we sucked in every little breeze that deigned to come out of the north. (Was that it? Was that the beginning of fall? Did you notice the sweat chilling on the other side of your body?) Every year I anticipate and notice that slight change in the air, but this year it was poignantly imagined.
If the Vermont thermometer on the kitchen window registered 75 degrees instead of 80 degrees at 5:00 AM, as I ventured out on my morning newspaper trek, I chose to think that fall was slowly, tenuously, testing: Are the plants and the chickens, the farmers and their friends suffering so much that they scorch out, press their tummies to damp soil in a soaked-earth spa, drink so much water that they risk death-by-drinking-too-much-water-too-fast (an odd water boarding technique where the tormentor is the victim), and hibernate in their man caves or at the air conditioned grocery stores?
Oddly, the crops we should be harvesting right now have already gained a peaceful but blanched countenance and quietly passed away. Most are now one with the earth. In their place: the second summer crop. Anticipating the predecessor’s death like a man auditions a new wife before he jettisons the old wife, we planted replacement crops, and those are bearing or will soon bear the veggies that will feed us until fall truly arrives.
The Side Field. Basil, Onions, Arugula. Green against the Drought...
And, since it’s now September, we are planting official fall crops as well. Getting the soil prepared is the tricky part. There is no moisture in it. Armed with a sharp shooter shovel -- narrow and long bladed -- I dug a foot-deep hole in a proposed strawberry bed to retrieve a sample of stricken dirt to send off to the soil lab in Edinburg, TX. It is the second sample I’ve sent the lab, questing for the perfect area in which to plant our most finicky crop.
It took me thirty minutes to dig the hole, even with hopping up and down on the shovel’s tiny shoulders, and wiggling the blade, trying to get it through the concreteness and around the stones.
For here, once stretching across the future strawberry beds, was the long barn, The farmers before us built a long pole barn for their implements, hay for the animals (for winters and for droughts), and to house no-longer needed pieces of the old farm house, like the shutters, which I can visualize stacked up against the rear wall....
1966 aerial photo: long barn is just above the big oak tree.
At one point, the farmers may have brought in stones for a floor. I find some in the beds. Almost all stones are imported to the bottom land, unless they were washed here by floods. Likely, since the 1930’s, the side-lined shutters watched the comings and goings, the repairs, the hauling in and out, the weather changes, the heat waves -- arguably less serious than our current one -- and one day, perhaps on a single-digit-humidity day, the hinges separated from the rotting wooden shutters and fell in and amongst the stones and pebbles and eventually slipped quietly into the upper realm of the soil.
A pair was found by us, a decade ago, as we industriously built raised beds over the footprint of the long barn. In my current quest to ready this land for strawberries -- which we’ll plant in late October, preferably after the weather cools and moistens -- I’ve re-built the requisite foot-tall beds. With Larry’s homemade hiller discs attached to Jaws’ tool bar, I turn my head around to see the discs dig out the footpaths and deposit the contents on top of last season’s bed. All goes well, with Jaws powering the discs to spin diligently to the task, until we get almost all the way to the back of each 200-foot bed. Fifteen feet from the finish, the big back tractor wheels and the heavy discs sashay to one side and the bed subsequently follows like a square dance partner. Exiting the field, I look back, mildly horrified, at the non conformity of the beds. Going at it from the other direction won’t solve the dilemma of the swag.
Jaw’s discs hiling the beds...
Why does it happen? I have a fertile imagination, so I dismiss hard pans and tree roots as being too tame an answer. Besides, hard pan is everywhere, and there are no trees near this area. It must be something solid down in the soil, perhaps a bit more than a foot down. Maybe it’s the location of a past barn, or maybe it’s the foundation of cabins built 170 years ago. Slave cabins.
I want to excavate the area, dig down to see what the answer is. I read somewhere that soil can build up at the rate of one foot per century. I don’t know if that is true, but looking at the height of our farm house piers in relation to the soil, it seems that the pioneers would surely have built taller piers to prevent penetration of flood water from the ever meandering Boggy Creek, and the soil level under the house is lower than the surrounding soil levels....
Another case of desire to go back in time, 170 years, with a camera clicking for five minutes, that’s all, as I don’t think I’m the greedy sort. Maybe instead, when we’re not busy, and when the soil is not so dry, we’ll do some digging and see if we can discover the cause of the swerve. But now, we’ll just twitch it straighter with shovels and focus on getting all the beds ready for fall....
Can’t wait.
Carol Ann Back